Land, Adopt, Expand, and Renew - With Hybrid Multicloud Consumptive Solutions from NetApp

Customer expectations and their consumption of IT resources have undergone radical shifts over the years. They are less focused on point product features and more on how end-to-end solutions will provide improved business outcomes. They are also less likely to make large up-front investments like they once did, and instead are expecting lower cost monthly and/or yearly “cloud-like” subscriptions and value-add services.

On the flip side, this also means that the customer has more flexibility to terminate a relationship with their technology vendor or partner at any point, if the solution/service does not meet their needs. As a result, traditional business models focused on sell, lock-in, refresh every three to five years are giving way to ones that are designed to prevent customer churn. These are some of fundamental tenets behind the LAER model – Land, Adopt, Expand, Renew.

NetApp is uniquely positioned to address these evolving customer requirements with a growing portfolio of managed and unmanaged consumptive offerings for both, private and public cloud solutions. These offerings enable partners to build an end-to-end hybrid multicloud Data Fabric for their customers, while also providing them the flexibility to better manage their IT expenses. More importantly, NetApp’s offerings enable partners to adopt the land-adopt-expand-renew model to generate recurring revenue streams from solution sales and services.

Landing with NetApp Consumptive solutions for Hybrid Multicloud

Partners are able to take advantage of NetApp’s portfolio of Hybrid Multicloud Consumptive solutions to land either on-premise or in any cloud provider of their choice. For example, partners can support customers in their move to AWS, Azure or GCP by landing with Cloud Volumes ONTAP - a cost-effective and secure solution built on NetApp’s proven ONTAP storage software - for backup or disaster recovery, typically the first step in a customer’s cloud journey. Alternatively, partners have the option to position Cloud Volumes Service for a fully managed and higher performance multicloud storage solution. On the Private Cloud front, partners can land with Cloud Consumption for NetApp HCI, NetApp’s leading HCI solution that is available for a monthly flat fee. Alternatively, Partners can also position a fully managed on-premise storage offering – Cloud Volumes Service On-Premise (CVSOP) – which is billed on a monthly basis, depending on usage, after a one-year contract.

Increasing Adoption

Once they have landed with the appropriate public or private cloud solution from NetApp, partners are able to increase customer adoption by helping them migrate their production workloads to the cloud, for example.  Similarly, on the private cloud front, they are able to help customers increase adoption by incrementally deploying “right-sized” compute and storage nodes, tailored to meet a customer’s specific requirement.

Expanding

NetApp’s tightly integrated solutions allow for expansion across the entire portfolio. For public cloud use cases, partners are able to expand by positioning a range of Cloud solutions from NetApp’s Cloud Data Services portfolio - Cloud Sync for migration, Cloud Insights for hybrid multicloud monitoring and optimizing or SaaS Backup to provide data protection for Office 365 applications on premise or in the cloud. This enables partners to offer a range of hybrid multicloud data management services, from pre-sales cloud assessment and advisory services to post-sales migration, data syncing, disaster recovery and performance optimization services.   

On the other hand, given the integration between NetApp’s Cloud Data Services portfolio and our HCI platform, partners are also able to expand by positioning the industry’s leading private cloud solutions to enable hybrid multicloud data management. For example, partners can leverage NetApp Kubernetes Service (NKS) for application development on our HCI platform or in the cloud. This enables customers to build applications on-premise and then move to a cloud provider of their choice or the other way around, just in a few clicks! As a result, partners are able to attach high value services focused on application lifecycle management in a hybrid multicloud environment.

Renewing

NetApp promotes an increasingly simplified renewal plan that enables partners to finalize deals in seconds and create more “stickiness” with their customers, thereby helping them maintain their relationship as a trusted advisor as they renew these subscriptions.

Finally, NetApp just announced the Fabric Orchestrator – a customer-facing portal for managing NetApp‘s portfolio of consumptive solutions for public and private clouds – the first of its kind in the industry! The Fabric Orchestrator enables a customer to procure and provision the public or private cloud consumptive solution of their choice and be able to manage their entire data estate through one centralized control plane!

In summary, NetApp’s portfolio of consumptive Data Fabric offerings provides partners with an opportunity to land (in public or in private clouds), increase customer adoption/consumption over time, expand by positioning adjacent NetApp solutions and finally maintain their relationship as a trusted advisor by renewing these subscriptions periodically. It provides NetApp partners with an opportunity to generate multiple, recurring revenue streams that have the potential to increase over time. Additionally, partners are able offer their customers end-to-end, hybrid multicloud data and application lifecycle management solutions that they can consume in a PAYGO fashion, in addition to high-value services to support these offerings – a win-win for both partners and customers!

Learn more about managing data in the cloud with NetApp by visiting Cloud Central.